Medici House in Stabio (round house)

Mario Botta – Medici House in Stabio (round house), 1980-1982

"I imagined a building with a circular plan, cut on its north-south axis by a slit from which the zenithal light descends.
A volume organized on three levels, a sort of tower or rather an object drawn and cut out on itself. The intent was not to offer an opportunity for comparison and / or to affirm a contrast with the surrounding building and instead to seek spatial relationships with the distant landscape and horizon. With a cylindrical volume I wanted to avoid elevations that need to be compared with the facades of existing houses. Such an articulated building body finds its raison d'etre in the stretched space between the earth (to which it is attached perimeter) and the sky (on which the roof opens from above with the skylight).
Around this vertical space I organized the various living functions with the ground floor conceived as a transition space between inside and outside, the first level conceived as a catalyst floor for the different activities (living area) and the second level proposed as a place of greater privacy ( sleeping area). The search for form and constructive spatial organization according to those intentions motivated my work around the project.
I was supported by the conviction of having to propose today a different environmental condition capable of gathering the primary and constant needs of living and of commensurate them with the new sensitivity and new aspirations determined by the current culture. In the design of the round house, as indeed in others, this condition has re-proposed my work as an architect as a continuous revision of the codes and certainties that I have developed and acquired in previous projects ".
Mario Botta, "The round house", edited by Roberto Trevisiol, L'Erba Desideri, Milan, 1982